Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Interesting how Russian industry has surpassed Germany so early. Russia is looking like it could be a superpower like the ENA.
Wunderwaffe joke goes here. But I do wonder if this could save Germany-I've been rooting for them from the start(though I can't really say why).
Hmm, I wonder what in a hundred years will tip Germany over the threshold into one last struggle for supremacy?
A politician recalling his escape from the burning debris of his parents' Dortmund flat a few decades back in the past?
Good update as always (it always brightens my day when I find this TL updated) even if I don't usually mention it. This time however I couldn't help noticing a rather foreboding line ...
Is it just me, or does this smell strongly of some not-so-subtle foreshadowing on the part of the ATL author?
I have a feeling Belgium will get its just deserts eventually.
Edit; damn, should've posted sooner.
Is it just me, or does this smell strongly of some not-so-subtle foreshadowing on the part of the ATL author?
I have a feeling Belgium will get its just deserts eventually.
Edit; damn, should've posted sooner.
Bulldoggus
Banned
Ok, I was just thinking, what is the stereotype of Germans ITTL? I mean IOTL it's of a very stern, efficient, militaristic type, but I feel like a lot of that is the result of a dominant Prussia.
Thande
Donor
Part #246: Departures
The country’s official name is: PORTUGUESE REPUBLIC.
The people are known as: PORTUGUESE.
Capital and largest city: Lisbon (180,000)
Flag: A red-black-red vertical tricolour, charged with a simplified evocation of a blue shield charged with five white bezants (as opposed to the five small shields used by the exiled monarchy).
Population: 3.6 million.
Land area: 6,000 lcf.
Economic ranking: Not usually considered.
Form of government: Unstable republic in which the army is the most powerful entity, and individual regimes may be removed by either open or surreptitious military action.
Foreign relations: Formerly a pariah state, Portugal recently shocked the world by opening dialogue with France and slowly moving towards becoming part of the French sphere.
Military: The Portuguese Army is oversized due to its politicised nature, with mass conscription used to inflate its size. European military analysts argue about whether the force is of any fighting quality to match this quantity or whether lack of experience and excessive ideological goals have dulled its standard. Historically a major naval power, Portugal’s naval forces have withered as the country lost its colonies and became inwards-looking.
Current head of state: Technically none—‘the Portuguese people’ are usually, unconvincingly, invoked in the stead of a head of state when taking oaths and so on.
Current head of government: First Consul João Vieira. In practice, of course, real power is exercised by the unofficial Army Council.
From: The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME V: THE QUENCHING ECLIPSE (1988):
Nafplion, Linneway Province, Confederation of Michigan, Empire of North America [OTL: Springfield, Illinois]
March 23rd 1899
F. B. ‘Jack’ Bryan smiled and hugged his wife Mary to him as they took their seats in the stands of Winnebago Field. He expected to catch a number of disapproving looks from the younger generation, who had been on another stick-up-backside kick lately about public displays of affection—which Bryan was suspiciously certain could be traced back to a popular Nassau Street musical opera with a Temperance theme.[1] His smile slipped when he realised that he was not receiving as many glares as he expected—mainly because the number of young people at the diamondball match was heartbreakingly low. Not because the dissolute youth were losing faith in what one singer of Jack’s generation had called ‘America’s Pastime’, but because most of the young men were fighting at the front, and an increasing number of young women were doing men’s jobs in the factories, helping supply their departed beaus with ammunition, uniforms and other essentials. Jack knew that all too well, as his day job was as a mid-level manager in one of those factories. A role normally handed out to sons or other favourites of the bosses, he had worked hard to obtain it on his own merits, even after suffering the leg injury in an industrial accident that meant that he had been passed up by the draft so far.
Still, when he walked through the gates of Winnebago Field, it was easy to let his memory play tricks on him, to dismiss the war to a distant trouble, to think that he was back in the days of peace. He had come here so many times, first alone as a kid and then with Mary when they were courting (he had been surprised and delighted to learn that she was, if anything, a bigger d-ball fanatic than he was). Then, of course, they had come with Jack Jr.
Now the last ghost of Bryan’s smile was gone. Jack Jr. Their son. They had worried when he had volunteered, and they had worried when his first letters, reduced to Bernese cheese by the censor’s scissors, arrived. Reading between the highly edited lines, it was obvious that Jack Jr.’s youthful expectations of war had not quite matched the reality. The Carolinian rebel traitors had not thrown in the sponge at the first taste of good loyal Jonathan steel. They had fought, and fought hard: fought like men fighting for their families, and with the bayonets of the torchies and their Negro lackeys pressed firmly between their shoulders.
Jack’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the rough wooden rail before him, heedless of splinters; his hands, toughened by years of factory work before his ascent to management, laughed as such things. He had woken up in the night, many times, fearing that the dreaded blue Lectel envelope would arrive on the doorstep in the morning. He knew Mary had done the same, though they tactfully did not discuss it. They talked about anything rather than discuss that. They had lost their Rosa, their little girl, when she was three, struck down by typhoid like so many others. Their other attempts at expanding the family had not succeeded. Jack Jr. was their last hope, and he had gone right into what (no matter what the papers tried to claim) was unquestionably the bloodiest and most deadly war the world had ever seen.
Miracle of miracles, he had survived thus far, survived the long grinding miserable fight to finally bring the five decades of southern treason to an ignominious end. But the war had not ended with the submission of Carolina. Now, Jack Jr.’s latest letter had rather vaguely implied around the rectangular holes, he was being put on a boat and sent somewhere. Maybe to join the troops subduing Mexico and Guatemala, Mary had suggested (her family was more educated than Jack’s and she was usually the one poring over all the elaborate guesswork maps in the papers). Jack, personally, was sceptical. Surely it would be easier to do that by the railway. If Jack Jr. was being put on a ship, he and his comrades must be on their way to—well, the West Indies, or to reclaim Venezuela from the torchies, or...he hardly dared even voice his third fear. But given some of the rhetoric coming out of Fredericksburg, some hints in the speeches from President Burwell that were periodically read out by the Mayor of Nafplion before the town hall, it might not be quite so far-fetched as he wanted so badly to be told it was.
Jack’s gloom was rudely interrupted by a swarthy-skinned man with a miniaturised barrow slung around his neck, equipped with a tiny engine emitting a visible hiss of steam. “Get your cold Italian ices! Get your corn nonpareil!” he bawled at the top of his voice in not-quite-English. “Get your brake-a-lets!” It took Jack a moment to realise he meant bracelets, or in fact the leather wristbands decorated with the colours and muskrat symbol of the Springfield Blue Caps.
Jack prepared to scowl at this interruption, then belatedly recognised the man as José Váldez, a Venezuelan immigrant a few years younger than himself whom he had once shared shifts with at the factory. He knew José could speak English perfectly fluently, so...he shook his head in anger. Jack might not be well educated, but, as Mary had always observed, he had a quick wit. He had swiftly worked out why a man like José was pretending to be a semiliterate Italian snack food seller: because everyone knew Italy was, at least, neutral, even if the French-led neutral bloc was increasingly unpopular. Jack had already heard cases of Venezuelan migrant workers, once welcomed to the ENA as few Spanish-speaking Papists ever had before, now subject to persecution because Linnaean idiots didn’t bother to distinguish between them and Meridians or Mexicans. It was an added insult to a folk whose country had been laid on the line and sacrificed to someone else’s war, a pawn traded between the two giants of the Novamund.
Jack did not acknowledge any of this, knowing José would not want attention drawing. Instead, he said: “Hey, you. Signor. Two large corn nonpareils and two bottles of sassafrass beer.” He gave a sidelong glance at Mary. “And what’ll you be having, dear?” Mary playfully slapped him.
“Grazie, signor,” José said, enunciating it carefully so it could not be taken to sound like ‘gracias’. He took the bottles from the miniature icebox on one side of his tray, then opened the lid on the part with the hissing steam engine and used a metal scoop to measure out some of the popped corn nonpareil into paper cones.
As Mary grabbed the food and drink, Jack handed over a one-imperial note, carefully slipping a tenner underneath it. He and Mary weren’t rich, but at least he didn’t have to worry about losing his job and being beaten up because he was the wrong colour and religion.
José’s eyes widened as he spotted the addition, then nodded gratefully. “Have a good day.” He turned away.
Mary glanced at him, aware that something had happened beneath the surface (she didn’t know José herself) but tactful enough not to bring it up. Instead she began crunching corn nonpareil in a decidedly unladylike way that would probably have made her mother wince if she had still been alive. Mary herself was developing greying hair and crow’s feet these days, but to Jack she was never more beautiful than now, sat on the cheap wooden stands of Winnebago Field, impatiently waiting for the game. She caught his gaze. “You know this stuff’s a Mexican invention,” she said indistinctly, then half-choked and resentfully drank some sassafrass beer while he grinned at her.
Jack shrugged. “Nobody’s that patriotic,” he retorted, and began crunching away himself.
Fortunately, there was little time to wait before the match began. The pre-war advertising spiel for Genuine North Massachusetts Spruce Gum had been replaced by the mayor’s representative warning of the dark consequences if they did not invest in Imperial Victory Bonds. They waited patiently for this to pass.
Jack stood, despite his leg threatening to give way as usual until he resentfully brought out his stick, for the national anthem alongside Mary.
“God Save our Empire free
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee we sing!
May God defend our land
Protect our families, and
Ever the throne shall stand
Our Emperor-King!”
Jack had always felt the later verses scanned rather better, but—again—even in wartime, nobody at a d-ball game was quite that patriotic. For once, he found himself belting out that ‘protect our families’ line, which wasn’t even a proper rhyme, with real feeling. He knew Mary was doing the same beside him.
The band struck up a light march as the teams walked out onto the diamond. The Blue Caps, as the home side, raised a cheer, while the opposition, the Johnville Green Stockings, got a polite round of scattered applause with the unspoken warning that this was the last time they’d get away without a boo. Quite apart from anything else, Johnville was south of the Penn-Calvert Line—they weren’t our kind of people.[2] In peacetime there would have been more opposition fans here to cheer back, of course, but right now the stands were only half full. It was probably as much a matter of morale as anything that the games continued; Jack had already seen the hasty broadsheets explaining that the players were not shirking the draft, and that they all had important industrial jobs when they weren’t playing.
The match began in earnest, and it was quickly apparent that the Blue Caps had the advantage—which was entirely to Jack and Mary’s taste. They still yelled themselves hoarse as Jacko Yeager, the Blue Caps’ star bowler, ascended the bowler’s mound and three Green Stocking batsmen struck out in a row as the keeper snatched the leather-seamed ball from the air. They booed half-heartedly as a Green Stocking outfielder made a spectacular catch and caught out Steve McMichael just before he was about to make it back to the crease and complete a home run. It was hard for even the most partisan fan to get too upset, with the Green Stockings so far behind anyway and that being such a brilliant piece of diamondball. Jack uncomfortably thought of comparisons to how the Meridians were doing in the war: would he be so blasé about allowing them a victory?
Mary regretfully drained the last of her sassafrass beer and stared dolefully into her empty cone, even as one of the Green Stocking batsmen threw his bat down in annoyance after hitting a pop fly. “Any chance of buying me one of those brotwursts, sweet hubby?” she said lightly, giving him the puppy-dog eyes look as she indicated one of José’s rival food sellers.
Jack shook his head in mock-exasperation. “You’re never satisfied with just one sausage, lovey,” he said, then paused and was suddenly very grateful that all those prudish youths were at the front line; Mary turned scarlet and giggled uncontrollably. “Er—I mean,” he added hastily, trying to recover his dignity, “um—I wonder if they’ve ever thought of combining these by coating the sausages with corn instead of putting them in a bread roll,” he muttered, staring into his own empty nonpareil cone. Unfortunately, this just made Mary laugh all the harder, drawing some confused looks when her voice accompanied another Green Stocking hitting a ‘four’ and making it to second base. Jack gave up and began to chuckle along with her.
It was at this point that he felt a tentative finger on his shoulder. “Um, Cousin Jack?” asked a familiar reedy voice.
Jack turned, resisting the urge to scowl. It was his annoying Cousin Throckmorton, who was staying with them since losing his own job. People tended to assume they were uncle and nephew rather than cousins given the age difference; Throcky was barely of draft age, thus far having dodged it due to his weak chest. Despite not being much of a sportsman himself, he was one of those dreadful cricket obsessives who thought diamondball was an insulting diminuation of the true great game, and wouldn’t normally be caught dead here.
The fact that he was here, and not casting contemptuous glances around, made Jack suddenly worried. “What is it, Throcky?” he asked.
Throckmorton shuffled from foot to foot for a moment. “Maybe I shouldn’t have...but I thought maybe if it was urgent...” he blathered.
Jack gripped his wrist, ignoring his fellow spectators looking on in annoyance at this interruption. “What is it, Throcky?”
Throckmorton wilted and drew something from his inside jacket pocket. As it brushed his fashionably minimalistic ‘wartime cuffs’, Jack caught sight of its colour and his heart stopped.
It was a Lectel envelope, as blue as the Nafplion players’ caps.
“This had just—” Throcky began, only to be cut off as Jack snatched the envelope from his hands and tore it open with one frenzied motion, as though if he did it quickly enough he could beat Fate or whatever to the punch before they could write the fatal name on the paper. If such a thing were possible, he failed. There were the three words, burning black, surrounded by the paler duplotype copy of the generic letter form: JOHN LANDON BRYAN. Above them, the brutal logo with its deadly acronym: OHIMS. On His Imperial Majesty’s Service.
“Oh! My God!” Jack blurted out, careless of any shocked glances his blasphemy drew. He handed over the Lectel with limp, bloodless hands. “Mary—!”
Mary, equally careless of what was proper, burst into tears then and there. “Oh, God, Jack—we—he—”
Throcky, with his customary lack of tact, was peering over their shoulders. “Hey—you do know it says he’s alive, Cuz—?”
Jack had snatched the Lectel back from Mary before Throckmorton had finished his sentence. His eyes swept back and forth like the carriage return of a soloprinter. “What—he—oh—THANK GOD!” he all but shrieked as he saw the words he had missed. “His ship—his ship was sunk—Mary—but they rescued him—his leg was injured, it says—THANK GOD!”
“F.B.!” Mary said. It took a lot for her to call him that rather than Jack. It could’ve been worse; she could have called him Francis Bassett, the name his naïve mother had bestowed upon him, being born at a time when the idiot Patriot had claimed to be able to bring a peace with honour to the Great American War. Jack hadn’t had much cause to ever go by his birth name. “F.B., he’s hurt! What are you thanking—”
“He’ll be sent back to us,” Jack said softly. “He’s out of it, Mare. He’s out.”
“But we don’t know how badly he was hurt—he could be cr...” Mary trailed off, then looked down, ashamed.
“Crippled, yes,” Jack said grimly, not holding the reflexive burst against her. “Like they once said about me. But you. You believed in me. Now you’ve got to believe in him. Me, too.”
Game forgotten, Throcky’s squawk of outrage ignored, they kissed with a hunger more passionate than they had ever known as a young couple. Their boy was coming home from the war.
*
[1] ‘Nassau Street’ rather than ‘Broadway’ is the metonym used to signify the theatre district in New York in TTL, although in practice the theatres have long expanded beyond that.
[2] Johnville, Washington Province, Confederation of Ohio is OTL Owensboro, Kentucky.
The country’s official name is: PORTUGUESE REPUBLIC.
The people are known as: PORTUGUESE.
Capital and largest city: Lisbon (180,000)
Flag: A red-black-red vertical tricolour, charged with a simplified evocation of a blue shield charged with five white bezants (as opposed to the five small shields used by the exiled monarchy).
Population: 3.6 million.
Land area: 6,000 lcf.
Economic ranking: Not usually considered.
Form of government: Unstable republic in which the army is the most powerful entity, and individual regimes may be removed by either open or surreptitious military action.
Foreign relations: Formerly a pariah state, Portugal recently shocked the world by opening dialogue with France and slowly moving towards becoming part of the French sphere.
Military: The Portuguese Army is oversized due to its politicised nature, with mass conscription used to inflate its size. European military analysts argue about whether the force is of any fighting quality to match this quantity or whether lack of experience and excessive ideological goals have dulled its standard. Historically a major naval power, Portugal’s naval forces have withered as the country lost its colonies and became inwards-looking.
Current head of state: Technically none—‘the Portuguese people’ are usually, unconvincingly, invoked in the stead of a head of state when taking oaths and so on.
Current head of government: First Consul João Vieira. In practice, of course, real power is exercised by the unofficial Army Council.
– Taken from APPENDIX: GUIDE TO THE WORLD’S NATIONS AT THE EVE OF THE PANDORIC WAR, OCTOBER 1896, from
The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981)
*The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME I: THE GATHERING STORM (1981)
From: The World At War: From The Pages of The Discerner VOLUME V: THE QUENCHING ECLIPSE (1988):
Nafplion, Linneway Province, Confederation of Michigan, Empire of North America [OTL: Springfield, Illinois]
March 23rd 1899
F. B. ‘Jack’ Bryan smiled and hugged his wife Mary to him as they took their seats in the stands of Winnebago Field. He expected to catch a number of disapproving looks from the younger generation, who had been on another stick-up-backside kick lately about public displays of affection—which Bryan was suspiciously certain could be traced back to a popular Nassau Street musical opera with a Temperance theme.[1] His smile slipped when he realised that he was not receiving as many glares as he expected—mainly because the number of young people at the diamondball match was heartbreakingly low. Not because the dissolute youth were losing faith in what one singer of Jack’s generation had called ‘America’s Pastime’, but because most of the young men were fighting at the front, and an increasing number of young women were doing men’s jobs in the factories, helping supply their departed beaus with ammunition, uniforms and other essentials. Jack knew that all too well, as his day job was as a mid-level manager in one of those factories. A role normally handed out to sons or other favourites of the bosses, he had worked hard to obtain it on his own merits, even after suffering the leg injury in an industrial accident that meant that he had been passed up by the draft so far.
Still, when he walked through the gates of Winnebago Field, it was easy to let his memory play tricks on him, to dismiss the war to a distant trouble, to think that he was back in the days of peace. He had come here so many times, first alone as a kid and then with Mary when they were courting (he had been surprised and delighted to learn that she was, if anything, a bigger d-ball fanatic than he was). Then, of course, they had come with Jack Jr.
Now the last ghost of Bryan’s smile was gone. Jack Jr. Their son. They had worried when he had volunteered, and they had worried when his first letters, reduced to Bernese cheese by the censor’s scissors, arrived. Reading between the highly edited lines, it was obvious that Jack Jr.’s youthful expectations of war had not quite matched the reality. The Carolinian rebel traitors had not thrown in the sponge at the first taste of good loyal Jonathan steel. They had fought, and fought hard: fought like men fighting for their families, and with the bayonets of the torchies and their Negro lackeys pressed firmly between their shoulders.
Jack’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the rough wooden rail before him, heedless of splinters; his hands, toughened by years of factory work before his ascent to management, laughed as such things. He had woken up in the night, many times, fearing that the dreaded blue Lectel envelope would arrive on the doorstep in the morning. He knew Mary had done the same, though they tactfully did not discuss it. They talked about anything rather than discuss that. They had lost their Rosa, their little girl, when she was three, struck down by typhoid like so many others. Their other attempts at expanding the family had not succeeded. Jack Jr. was their last hope, and he had gone right into what (no matter what the papers tried to claim) was unquestionably the bloodiest and most deadly war the world had ever seen.
Miracle of miracles, he had survived thus far, survived the long grinding miserable fight to finally bring the five decades of southern treason to an ignominious end. But the war had not ended with the submission of Carolina. Now, Jack Jr.’s latest letter had rather vaguely implied around the rectangular holes, he was being put on a boat and sent somewhere. Maybe to join the troops subduing Mexico and Guatemala, Mary had suggested (her family was more educated than Jack’s and she was usually the one poring over all the elaborate guesswork maps in the papers). Jack, personally, was sceptical. Surely it would be easier to do that by the railway. If Jack Jr. was being put on a ship, he and his comrades must be on their way to—well, the West Indies, or to reclaim Venezuela from the torchies, or...he hardly dared even voice his third fear. But given some of the rhetoric coming out of Fredericksburg, some hints in the speeches from President Burwell that were periodically read out by the Mayor of Nafplion before the town hall, it might not be quite so far-fetched as he wanted so badly to be told it was.
Jack’s gloom was rudely interrupted by a swarthy-skinned man with a miniaturised barrow slung around his neck, equipped with a tiny engine emitting a visible hiss of steam. “Get your cold Italian ices! Get your corn nonpareil!” he bawled at the top of his voice in not-quite-English. “Get your brake-a-lets!” It took Jack a moment to realise he meant bracelets, or in fact the leather wristbands decorated with the colours and muskrat symbol of the Springfield Blue Caps.
Jack prepared to scowl at this interruption, then belatedly recognised the man as José Váldez, a Venezuelan immigrant a few years younger than himself whom he had once shared shifts with at the factory. He knew José could speak English perfectly fluently, so...he shook his head in anger. Jack might not be well educated, but, as Mary had always observed, he had a quick wit. He had swiftly worked out why a man like José was pretending to be a semiliterate Italian snack food seller: because everyone knew Italy was, at least, neutral, even if the French-led neutral bloc was increasingly unpopular. Jack had already heard cases of Venezuelan migrant workers, once welcomed to the ENA as few Spanish-speaking Papists ever had before, now subject to persecution because Linnaean idiots didn’t bother to distinguish between them and Meridians or Mexicans. It was an added insult to a folk whose country had been laid on the line and sacrificed to someone else’s war, a pawn traded between the two giants of the Novamund.
Jack did not acknowledge any of this, knowing José would not want attention drawing. Instead, he said: “Hey, you. Signor. Two large corn nonpareils and two bottles of sassafrass beer.” He gave a sidelong glance at Mary. “And what’ll you be having, dear?” Mary playfully slapped him.
“Grazie, signor,” José said, enunciating it carefully so it could not be taken to sound like ‘gracias’. He took the bottles from the miniature icebox on one side of his tray, then opened the lid on the part with the hissing steam engine and used a metal scoop to measure out some of the popped corn nonpareil into paper cones.
As Mary grabbed the food and drink, Jack handed over a one-imperial note, carefully slipping a tenner underneath it. He and Mary weren’t rich, but at least he didn’t have to worry about losing his job and being beaten up because he was the wrong colour and religion.
José’s eyes widened as he spotted the addition, then nodded gratefully. “Have a good day.” He turned away.
Mary glanced at him, aware that something had happened beneath the surface (she didn’t know José herself) but tactful enough not to bring it up. Instead she began crunching corn nonpareil in a decidedly unladylike way that would probably have made her mother wince if she had still been alive. Mary herself was developing greying hair and crow’s feet these days, but to Jack she was never more beautiful than now, sat on the cheap wooden stands of Winnebago Field, impatiently waiting for the game. She caught his gaze. “You know this stuff’s a Mexican invention,” she said indistinctly, then half-choked and resentfully drank some sassafrass beer while he grinned at her.
Jack shrugged. “Nobody’s that patriotic,” he retorted, and began crunching away himself.
Fortunately, there was little time to wait before the match began. The pre-war advertising spiel for Genuine North Massachusetts Spruce Gum had been replaced by the mayor’s representative warning of the dark consequences if they did not invest in Imperial Victory Bonds. They waited patiently for this to pass.
Jack stood, despite his leg threatening to give way as usual until he resentfully brought out his stick, for the national anthem alongside Mary.
“God Save our Empire free
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee we sing!
May God defend our land
Protect our families, and
Ever the throne shall stand
Our Emperor-King!”
Jack had always felt the later verses scanned rather better, but—again—even in wartime, nobody at a d-ball game was quite that patriotic. For once, he found himself belting out that ‘protect our families’ line, which wasn’t even a proper rhyme, with real feeling. He knew Mary was doing the same beside him.
The band struck up a light march as the teams walked out onto the diamond. The Blue Caps, as the home side, raised a cheer, while the opposition, the Johnville Green Stockings, got a polite round of scattered applause with the unspoken warning that this was the last time they’d get away without a boo. Quite apart from anything else, Johnville was south of the Penn-Calvert Line—they weren’t our kind of people.[2] In peacetime there would have been more opposition fans here to cheer back, of course, but right now the stands were only half full. It was probably as much a matter of morale as anything that the games continued; Jack had already seen the hasty broadsheets explaining that the players were not shirking the draft, and that they all had important industrial jobs when they weren’t playing.
The match began in earnest, and it was quickly apparent that the Blue Caps had the advantage—which was entirely to Jack and Mary’s taste. They still yelled themselves hoarse as Jacko Yeager, the Blue Caps’ star bowler, ascended the bowler’s mound and three Green Stocking batsmen struck out in a row as the keeper snatched the leather-seamed ball from the air. They booed half-heartedly as a Green Stocking outfielder made a spectacular catch and caught out Steve McMichael just before he was about to make it back to the crease and complete a home run. It was hard for even the most partisan fan to get too upset, with the Green Stockings so far behind anyway and that being such a brilliant piece of diamondball. Jack uncomfortably thought of comparisons to how the Meridians were doing in the war: would he be so blasé about allowing them a victory?
Mary regretfully drained the last of her sassafrass beer and stared dolefully into her empty cone, even as one of the Green Stocking batsmen threw his bat down in annoyance after hitting a pop fly. “Any chance of buying me one of those brotwursts, sweet hubby?” she said lightly, giving him the puppy-dog eyes look as she indicated one of José’s rival food sellers.
Jack shook his head in mock-exasperation. “You’re never satisfied with just one sausage, lovey,” he said, then paused and was suddenly very grateful that all those prudish youths were at the front line; Mary turned scarlet and giggled uncontrollably. “Er—I mean,” he added hastily, trying to recover his dignity, “um—I wonder if they’ve ever thought of combining these by coating the sausages with corn instead of putting them in a bread roll,” he muttered, staring into his own empty nonpareil cone. Unfortunately, this just made Mary laugh all the harder, drawing some confused looks when her voice accompanied another Green Stocking hitting a ‘four’ and making it to second base. Jack gave up and began to chuckle along with her.
It was at this point that he felt a tentative finger on his shoulder. “Um, Cousin Jack?” asked a familiar reedy voice.
Jack turned, resisting the urge to scowl. It was his annoying Cousin Throckmorton, who was staying with them since losing his own job. People tended to assume they were uncle and nephew rather than cousins given the age difference; Throcky was barely of draft age, thus far having dodged it due to his weak chest. Despite not being much of a sportsman himself, he was one of those dreadful cricket obsessives who thought diamondball was an insulting diminuation of the true great game, and wouldn’t normally be caught dead here.
The fact that he was here, and not casting contemptuous glances around, made Jack suddenly worried. “What is it, Throcky?” he asked.
Throckmorton shuffled from foot to foot for a moment. “Maybe I shouldn’t have...but I thought maybe if it was urgent...” he blathered.
Jack gripped his wrist, ignoring his fellow spectators looking on in annoyance at this interruption. “What is it, Throcky?”
Throckmorton wilted and drew something from his inside jacket pocket. As it brushed his fashionably minimalistic ‘wartime cuffs’, Jack caught sight of its colour and his heart stopped.
It was a Lectel envelope, as blue as the Nafplion players’ caps.
“This had just—” Throcky began, only to be cut off as Jack snatched the envelope from his hands and tore it open with one frenzied motion, as though if he did it quickly enough he could beat Fate or whatever to the punch before they could write the fatal name on the paper. If such a thing were possible, he failed. There were the three words, burning black, surrounded by the paler duplotype copy of the generic letter form: JOHN LANDON BRYAN. Above them, the brutal logo with its deadly acronym: OHIMS. On His Imperial Majesty’s Service.
“Oh! My God!” Jack blurted out, careless of any shocked glances his blasphemy drew. He handed over the Lectel with limp, bloodless hands. “Mary—!”
Mary, equally careless of what was proper, burst into tears then and there. “Oh, God, Jack—we—he—”
Throcky, with his customary lack of tact, was peering over their shoulders. “Hey—you do know it says he’s alive, Cuz—?”
Jack had snatched the Lectel back from Mary before Throckmorton had finished his sentence. His eyes swept back and forth like the carriage return of a soloprinter. “What—he—oh—THANK GOD!” he all but shrieked as he saw the words he had missed. “His ship—his ship was sunk—Mary—but they rescued him—his leg was injured, it says—THANK GOD!”
“F.B.!” Mary said. It took a lot for her to call him that rather than Jack. It could’ve been worse; she could have called him Francis Bassett, the name his naïve mother had bestowed upon him, being born at a time when the idiot Patriot had claimed to be able to bring a peace with honour to the Great American War. Jack hadn’t had much cause to ever go by his birth name. “F.B., he’s hurt! What are you thanking—”
“He’ll be sent back to us,” Jack said softly. “He’s out of it, Mare. He’s out.”
“But we don’t know how badly he was hurt—he could be cr...” Mary trailed off, then looked down, ashamed.
“Crippled, yes,” Jack said grimly, not holding the reflexive burst against her. “Like they once said about me. But you. You believed in me. Now you’ve got to believe in him. Me, too.”
Game forgotten, Throcky’s squawk of outrage ignored, they kissed with a hunger more passionate than they had ever known as a young couple. Their boy was coming home from the war.
*
[1] ‘Nassau Street’ rather than ‘Broadway’ is the metonym used to signify the theatre district in New York in TTL, although in practice the theatres have long expanded beyond that.
[2] Johnville, Washington Province, Confederation of Ohio is OTL Owensboro, Kentucky.
Thande
Donor
Yes, I'm a bit busy at present with coverage of the US midterms (which you can see on the world's worst website here if you're so inclined) but it's best to try to keep the engine running on LTTW and I had an inspiration.
Also, a user named @talonschild pointed out that because the 2016 forum update trashed the original links, one can't currently view the frontispiece for Volume IV and I can't go and edit the original thread now - so, for their viewing pleasure and anyone else's, here it is below.
VOLUME FOUR:
COMETH THE HOUR...
.
Also, a user named @talonschild pointed out that because the 2016 forum update trashed the original links, one can't currently view the frontispiece for Volume IV and I can't go and edit the original thread now - so, for their viewing pleasure and anyone else's, here it is below.
VOLUME FOUR:
COMETH THE HOUR...
“Imagine there's no countries
it isn’t hard to do
nothing to kill or die for
and no religion too
imagine all the people, living life in peace, yoo hoo
you may say I’m a dreamer
but I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
and the world will live as one.”
.
Thande
Donor
I assume that's the same reference as the one I'm going for - I recently discovered this meme while reading American physics textbooks.
It just means popcorn. Nonpareils were one of the words used for popcorn in the American colonies OTL (by analogy to how it's more often used to mean round sweets or those hundreds-and-thousands people put on cakes).
Yeah, that was just a typo by Alex on the map, no biggie.
So, in other words, Vieira is the head of state and someone on the Army Council is the head of government?
I assume that's the same reference as the one I'm going for - I recently discovered this meme while reading American physics textbooks.
Yeah I specifically had this photo in mind:
